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CHAPTER FOUR
ITTOOKCRETEa moment or two to process that question.
He stopped moving around the graceful room she’d led him into. It gave the sense of genteel clutter and faded glory, from the arched glass windows that curved up overhead to the battered old carpets tossed this way and that across the floor. Betraying the sort of carelessness that went along with generational wealth, he thought.
It was only when your great-grandfather had carted that rug back from the mystical lands where he’d found it, and your grandmother had used it in her dressing room, that you might carry on and fling it on the floor beneath a great mess of planters.
Still, he couldn’t work up his usual disdain for these people who thought the world had been built for their pleasure. Because the books on the overstuffed shelves that lined the back wall were not the fancy hardbacks with gold embossing on the spines that he always thought looked fake. They seemed to be popular in the supposed libraries a certain sort of man always seemed to have scattered about the old stately home, though Crete had never been able to imagine a person actually using such a place for anything but attempting to intimidate.
But this room was different. It felt like Timoney.
“Is this your room?” he asked, because it had her air, somehow. Did he actually smell wildflower honey, or was he imagining it? All the books on the shelves were well read. He could see the swollen, cracked spines of thick, fat paperbacks. He picked up a battered hardcover at random and found the pages worn from turning.
This was like a view inside of her, and he had avoided that. Had gone out of his way to avoid that, in point of fact. This was an intimacy. And Crete had always preferred that his intimacies remain only and ever physical.
“My mother used to grow her favorite plants here,” Timoney told him, a distant sort of look in her eyes, as if she was looking off into a beloved past. That, too, seemed like an intimate moment. Or maybe it was that he, personally, had no experience with any past that wasn’t harsh. So much so that, any time she had attempted to talk about the parents she so clearly loved, he had prevented her. Usually by stoking the fires between them as he would have dearly liked to do now. But he did not. Because if she wished to discuss her mother, he would grit his teeth and allow her to make her mother real for him. No matter how uncomfortable it made him. “She was no gardener, but she liked to putter about with the odd herb and an occasional hardy geranium. She would play with potting soil and seeds in the sunlight and I would read.”
The look on her face was so open then. So naked. Something seized in his chest at the sight, and he told himself it was concern for her, that was all. That she should show such softness to another. That she would allow herself such recklessness and let it infect the whole of her face.
That she should let anyone see her feelings like this. Even him.Especiallyhim.
She sniffed as she regarded him, her expression suddenly much less soft. “You haven’t answered the question.”
He looked at the shelves of books again, a vast selection of all genres with colorful covers and yellowing pages, trying to imagine Timoney here. As a small child, as young girl, as a sulky teenager. And with a mother who wanted to spend time with her—or, at least, did not actively avoid it.
The notion was like folklore. He dismissed it.
“Why am I like what?” he asked. Coolly.
He turned to face her again, and they were indoors now. This room was far brighter than the moonlight out in the garden. The lamps she’d turned on as she entered, finding them so easily in the dark that he should have known precisely how comfortable she was here, cast a buttery light all around. He had told himself, in that moment before she’d switched on the first light, that the spell would be broken. That the creature he’d seen out there in the dark was not the enchantress she’d seemed in that swirling red cloak, as much mist as moon.
But of course, in the light, it was worse.
She made his mouth go dry.
Timoney still wore her cloak, swirled around her like some kind of blanket. She pulled her feet up beneath her and she should have looked like a child, sitting there on that little couch of hers while she gazed up at him with her blue eyes so solemn.
Almost accusatory.
But she did not look like a little girl at all. Even inside, she looked as if the moon was in her hair. She was elfin, unworldly. Her blond hair was silvery as it fell about her shoulders, cascading down from two pearlescent combs. Her chin was pointed just enough to make her face the shape of a heart. And there was that perfect bow of a mouth of hers, generous and sensual, that he had tasted a thousand times. Yet he still wanted more.
He had accepted that truth, uncomfortable as it was, out there in the dark.
Or he had stopped fighting it. Surely that was the same thing.
“Everybody knows your story,” Timoney said after a moment. In a careful sort of way, as if she was choosing her words with precision. As if he required such handling.
He bristled at that notion. “Do they indeed? Am I so easily digested, then?”
“What you tell of your story, anyway,” she amended, a considering sort of look on her face. “Your mother met your father when she was very young and he was on a business trip to Athens.”
Crete would never understand why the everyday squalid details of his parents’ lives were a subject of such fascination to other people. When what mattered, to his mind, was never the hand he’d been dealt but what games he’d learned to play—and win—with those cards.
“My father had the affair,” he said now. Perhaps too brusquely. “He was married. My mother was foolish perhaps, but all she did was follow her heart. She was eighteen. He was thirty-four. I tell you this only because their age gap is always mentioned, as if it alone is what caused all the trouble.”
Timoney looked almost dreamy. “I think many people forget that eighteen feels quite worldly and grown up. To the person experiencing it.”
Crete found himself leaning back against the nearest bookshelf and thrusting his hands deep in the pockets of his trousers, because it was that hard to keep them to himself. He tried to remember other times that he and Timoney had sat about talking, but none came to mind.
